Is Tooling Undervalued?

My viewpoint is from the outside of the job shop business so please take my comment as food for thought rather news from the "trenches".

I think tax laws have a lot of influence on the visibility of tooling investments. Economic factors influence whether tooling is capitalized or expensed. Expensing cutting tools is logical because they are clearly consumable. For statisticians expensed items may be a good bit less visible. Special fixtures for a single job are probably the same. All the other stuff like tool holders, modular tooling systems, metrology tools, spare parts may have long life but still be expensed. I don't know the exact rules and how businesses tend to employ them; but to analyze the trends in tooling purchases I think one has to figure out how to separate out the tax influence.

Beyond that I don't see a lot of changes in standards for interchangeability of tooling between machines. Tool holders and fixture mounting systems haven't changed. There has been no great transition to metric system hardware that forces the discarding of old tooling. If anything I think there is a lot of inertia in the job shop marketplace that forces equipment manufacturers to respect the legacy tooling investment that their customers have.

I think another factor is that machine tool manufacturers and their control developers keep adding new features that reduce the need for special tooling. Improvements in cutter life will result in fewer cutters and their tool holders out of service for resharpening or other adjustment. Better metrology and overall process control (like SPC and in-situ metrology) have a similar effect.

Still another effect is that the glitter seems to have worn off the JIT production idea resulting in more efficiency of scale and fewer tools tied up out of service waiting for last minute fast delivery orders.

Now you guys in the "biz" please let me know what is really happening. Is it just that with the recession of the last few years good used tools from shops going out of business are being picked up by the survivors in a piece of commerce largely off the economists' radar screens?

Ed Weldon